A Picnic At The Park, Leonardo, and the Blues

Since yesterday, the weather has turned warmer to the point where one
starts to look for a spot of shade to sit in. Which led to todays
breakfast taking place as a mini picnic in the park. Sitting in the
grass, munching a bit of toast, drinking chocolate milk, and enjoying
the view. Afterwards going to see the Leonardo da Vinci exhibition at
the Μέγαρον Μουσικής (Megaron Mousikis)...

Somehow it's a good exhibition, with some of his inventions brought to
life at least as models, some of them even working. But then it was not
very big. Most of the sketches and illustrative books in the second room
were copies by later artists. That might illustrate how the legend of
Leonardo built up and carried through time, but it's not the same as
seeing something original.

There is one point that cooled things down for me: I somehow remember
when I was a kid we had a big book with reproductions of some of
Leonardo's notebooks. I must have sit there with this book looking at
those inventions for hours. To me those inventions always were alive. I
didn't need models to see them, in fact models couldn't match my
imagination.

Now after a day full of good weather and good impressions, I still feel
blue, for various personal reasons. Don't get me wrong, it's all fine
and dandy. I just prefer to tune up to some smooth jazz internet radio
and sip a cup of tea, letting it all get to me tonight.

A Short Work Week After Easter

It's been a short work week since I came back from my trip to Limnos. I
came home Tuesday morning around 7. After traveling over night on the
ship and not sleeping well this time, I was too dizzy and tired to go to
work as planned. So I took another day off and stayed in bed. Good
decision, since when I came to work on Wednesday I was able to dig into
the job again.

It seems it had done me good being away for a few days, exercising in
the fresh air, seeing the sea, seeing my friends from the village.
Also I wasn't so long away as to loose my general train of thought at
work. Despite having something of a turmoil in my personal life, I
managed to get forward in our project. We are getting real close to
reach our next milestone and that feels good.

This weekend is a three day weekend too, since May 1st is a day off work.
Would be nice to make a short excursion too, but the weather isn't like
that at all. It's cloudy and at times rainy. So time to stay home,
relax, write a bit of something and maybe read a good book.

Walking Home From Thission

Just walked home from Thission (in the center of Athens), because due to today being the first of May, busses and subways have had strikes for some hours. It's been quite a walk, almost an hour. Could have taken a taxi, but it was nice to walk.

First Swim this Year

After the very interesting HelMUG meeting this morning, Panos "libero" (vice-president of HelMUG) invited me over to go for a swim on a beach near the place where he lives. We hopped into his car and drove to Porto Rafti on the other side of Attica, same place where I've been just a few days ago. This time we went right down to the beach. There were people there, but it wasn't too crowded. It's a family beach with shallow water. I went for my first swim this year - I'm late! - enjoyed it very much, even though the water was very cold. Usually it's warmer at that place, but occasionally the sea currents carry colder waters. A good sunbath afterwards was the proper remedy.

Scribbling and Handwriting at Work

In
Writing the old way Rodolfo writes about how good it feels to write
on old fashioned paper. Which today reminded me to tell you about one of
my work habits. My work as a programmer involves some thinking time.
This may be in big chunks of time when I sit there and think about how
to design a big piece of my work. Or I might be in the middle of coding
and having to think a particular small problem through. Writing and
scribbling on a piece of paper is one of my preferred tools at that
point.

My notes might be complete writeups with diagrams, or they might be just
some words and reminders. Sometimes I just knock some method names on
the paper. But I never really throw those notes away.

You see, keeping it all is part of my strategy. Next to my desk I have
two small piles of these note papers. They are vaguely in historic
order. Normally I never look at them, but it happens that I have to
think about an old idea and then you can find me leafing through those
old notes, looking for that scribbled diagram I remember I once made.

Those piles aren't too big (I don't need so many notes). It all looks
kind of neat, especially since my desk is almost empty - everything but
those notes is inside the computer. Interesting enough I'm a "messy
desk" person usually, dunno how I manage at work to have a clean desk.

Breaking Down of the Cell Walls

Everybody likes watching people in the bus. You came in a couple of stops after me, dressed up nice and decent, ready for the office. You sat down next to another girl, not far from me, with the telephone already on the ear.

Πως είσαι, μπαμπά;
...
Όχι καλά;
...
Τι εννοείς όχι καλά;

(How are you papa?
...
Not good?
...
What do you mean, not good?)

You listened for a long time. When you talked again, I made a conscious effort to not listen any more. I started to listen to the lady on my other side who talked with her husband about taxi drivers or shopping or something. When I looked in your direction again a while later, you had put the phone down. You were sitting there with a little line between your eyes, very upright and still you seemed to be hunched down. You looked out of the window, probably you were wondering what you could do now, here, sitting in the bus. No line of movement, nothing you can do now, even if there was something you could do. I felt so sorry, but there was no way I could have helped either. There are those moments when we are glued into it, caught in this life. Ισόβια (lifetime, I'd seen this word printed on a leaflet from the bank where I was this morning, they were referring to pension funds).

There are so many people in the tight space of this city, too close together. Everybody is developing a thick skin, many are getting aggressive once you get too close to them (and then many get very friendly once you get close to them). Sometimes there is something in the air that makes these borders between the minds easier to break down, at least for a short see-through. Yesterday evening I had the feeling that one of those short windows was coming.

Looks like a geek to me

This morning on the way to the bus, I passed by a little street with a very narrow sidewalk. There was a painter, putting white paint all over a freshly renovated shop. I left the sidewalk, walked around the parked cars and continued on the street to avoid getting paint on me. When I was passing on the height of the shop, the painter called out to me, can I ask you a question? I sometimes get asked for the road (strange enough), so I stopped and went closer. He showed me his mobile phone and said: "There was this strange message about the SIM card on the phone, and now look what it does." He gave me the phone, it read "Please insert SIM card." I couldn't really help him, but it struck me as funny that he spotted me as a geek from 10 meters far. (This part is what I was planning to post till I came into the bus. See, the tissue between the entities living in this city sometimes breaks down in multiple ways. It was in the air this morning I would say.)

World Refugee Day

Yesterday was
World
Refugee Day, of which I learned through
DeviousDiva. I missed writing
about it on time, but better late than never. Myself I'm living in a
"foreign" country - which is, in a country whose passport I don't have
and where I wasn't born or have a direct cultural background in. But I'm
not here as a refugee (no, running away from the shitty weather in
northern Europe doesn't count). I have papers (lots of them), an
official job, a work permit for the next five years, I pay taxes. It's
quite a difference and still it fuels my thoughts...

I see other foreigners here, whose status I sometimes doubt (at least
the ones hanging outside the office for asylum seekers are pretty
obvious). Frankly I wouldn't want to be in their shoes. Neither when
they arrived here, nor back in the situations they had to go away from,
nor on the road they had to take.

Leaving your surroundings (a familiar country, friends, family) is hard
enough sometimes, even if it is due to your own wish. If ever you are
forced to, it sure must be a mean experience. Most people I know don't
like calling complete strangers on the phone, asking for something as
simple as some information or to order something. Now imagine being
thrown out and having to rely on strangers for your every step. (I'm
leaving out the stuff about plain threats for your life here for
brevity.) Being down and out isn't fun.

In our city's streets, looking at people who do shitty jobs on lowest
pay to get by, who sell trinkets while watching out for the cops,
because they don't really have papers... sometimes I meditate about what
would happen to us well off "westerners" thrown into such a situation.
We definitely are not used to that lifestyle. We are used to having lots
of things we can rely on, services we take for granted. There are
examples of "westerners" who by accident ended up in situations like
these (hippies stranded in India, people who've lost their papers in a
big city while on vacation). Some cope very well, but most of them are
all too happy to get a ticket back to their normal life.

Looking a bit further back in time, just two generations ago, it was
quite common for western europeans to be refugees. We've had our share
of displacement and political refugees, of pain and suffering. Even if
we did well since the second world war, we shouldn't forget that we too
could be on the wrong side of the office where one has to prove
identity and reason. A little awareness (as the World Refugee Day asks
from us) goes a long way then.

Why Crappy Music is on the Radio

I'm reading some of these emails with the nice disclaimer like "the
information in this transmission may contain privileged and confidential
information. It is intended only for the person(s) named above..." -
The messages have not been mailed to me, but it's perfectly legal for me to
read them. They are also interesting to read, though I get a bit stirred
up by them. How comes? They are published as part of a court decision,
where Sony was ordered to pay ten million dollars (pocket money to
them). Sony got caught bribing radio stations to play "their" artists,
to get those records into the mainstream feeding frenzy. Some thoughts
come up with this...

"Is it any wonder why that
fantastic fantastic fantastic band you love that is on a small indie
label doesn't get airplay on the radio? How can it compete when big
labels are bribing with computers, flights to concerts, digital cameras,
and let's not forget CASH."

To me there is another spin to that. There is some music on the radio
that is so bad, so sugary cheap, one wonders how it ever came to peoples
attention. The answer is in quotes like these:

"...it cost us over 4000.0 to get Franz on WKSE..."
"You have room for a money record this week?"
"In return for this promotion Donnie Michaels will put Kelly's "Stole"
into a subpower rotation 5-6 spins a day..."

(Oh and in case you wondered, that reference to "Franz" means "Franz
Ferdinand", one of the bands that are in the hype right now. So how did
they get into the hype? Just by making good music...? Or do 4000$ to a single radio station make any difference?)

Next thought: Dear company people, if you pull off stuff like that which
you *know* is illegal[1] and or against any decent sense of moral[2], why
don't you at least *try* and show some sense? At least make a bit of an
effort to encrypt at least the company internal mails. I don't think it
would have gotten very far, since those mails probably would have been
subpoenaed at some point (or leaked out unencrypted through stupidity
etc.), but when you marketroids look at your sloppy orthography and
grammar exposed
in a publicly hosted pdf file, it should give you some thoughts. Hey,
lots of companies use S/MIME nowadays, it fits in with the corporate
thought-police. Who could resist a phrase like "centrally controlled
certification authority"?

Another afterthought: Some of the mails come from a blackberry account.
Maybe just maybe this isn't such a good thing for doing unlawful things,
as it stores your mails on a server which you and your corporate lawyers
don't have direct control over. Try GMail next for extra laughs.

[1]: It's not the first time a record company has been busted for stuff
like that.
[2]: I know, I know, at this point (after stuff like the root kit), nobody
expects to find any morals in relation to Sony.